How does a mom get over the fear and anxiety that comes with having a kid? Or I guess I should rephrase: How does a mom reduce the fear and anxiety that comes with having a kid? I realize it’s not realistic for it to go away.
I don’t think I necessarily have an outsized or abnormal amount of fear and anxiety surrounding my kid, which is surprising to me — I would have thought I’d be an extra anxious parent, given my anxiety surrounding other topics. I probably have a pretty typical amount of nerves.
For the first three months of Miles’ life, I was known to spend some time leaning over his bassinet, listening for his little breaths, but who doesn’t do that? And I have a healthy amount of fear around choking, cutting up his food into far smaller pieces than they really need to be cut into, but again… who doesn’t do that? That’s just good sense.
And while I kept Miles out of daycare for the first year of his life, caring for him and working from home simultaneously so he could avoid potential exposure to the coronavirus, I finally agreed to send him a few months after his first birthday, even though the pandemic was still going strong. After a cost-benefit analysis, my husband and I realized the benefits of care outside the home outweighs the risks. So…. I’m super rational, right?
Some of the time.
Last night I was reading this book, Girls With Bright Futures. It’s about parents at an elite prep school being super intense about college admissions and it’s a great book, 10/10 would recommend, but that’s neither here nor there. I mention the book because I had a strong reaction to one of the plotlines: One character in the book has a 3-year-old son with leukemia and she’s seeking a stem-cell donor to keep him alive. While I was reading the scene in which she begs his half-sister to test herself and see if she’s a match, I burst into tears. The tears kept flowing as the book described the mother’s grief, her desperation, the sheer intensity of her fear of losing her baby boy.
I couldn’t stop crying. And that’s not the first time that’s happened. Any time I read a book about a sick or dying child, or see something about the topic on TV or in the movies, I break down. Has the topic increased in prominence over the last few years, or am I just noticing it more, feeling it more? I suspect it’s the latter.
I remember a mother telling me years before I got pregnant with Miles that she started to cry at everything after she had children. She actually stopped watching movies altogether because she couldn’t stand when they entered the dreaded sad-child story, and she would only read a book or watch a TV show if it had been thoroughly vetted and she was assured of its overall positivity and happy ending. At the time, I remember smiling and nodding and thinking, wow, you can’t watch ANY movies anymore? Seems extreme.
But now I totally get it. I mean, I’ll watch movies and TV shows and consume other forms of entertainment, but I turn it off the second it delves into sick-child territory. I’ll push through with books because I love them so and feel they deserve my full attention, but, as previously noted, anything sad will end in me sobbing and struggling to catch my breath.
So I return to my opening question: When will I get over the fear and anxiety that comes along with having children? Never? Cool, that’s what I thought.